From ‘Sharknado’ to ‘Snakes on a Train’: The Asylum’s insane low-budget cinema
Every yin must have a yang, and as it applies to the low-budget rip-offs of the biggest blockbusters in Hollywood, The Asylum has turned shoestring schlock into not only an art form, but a hugely profitable enterprise, despite specialising almost entirely in awful, awful movies.
It sounds scarcely believable given the company’s reputation, but founders David Michael Latt, David Rimawi, and Sherri Strain initially envisioned the production company as a distribution hub for inexpensive dramas before realising there was simply too much competition in that area. Instead, The Asylum pivoted to making its own films, eventually stumbling on a formula that worked wonders.
Even though the outfit was established in 1997, it would be almost a decade before The Asylum settled into its groove of capitalising on the most high-profile releases emerging from Hollywood and releasing its own inexpensive and gratuitous cash-ins that had the potential to shift enough copies to turn a profit based on the similarities in nomenclature alone.
On the cusp of Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise unleashing War of the Worlds in the summer of 2005, The Asylum dropped H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds a mere 24 hours beforehand. After their knockoff proved hugely lucrative in its own right, the company was off to the races and began ensuring it had a cinematic facsimile ready to go to coincide with the titles that were quite clearly being imitated.
King of the Lost World coincided with Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake, viral sensation Snakes on a Plane was emulated by The Asylum’s Snakes on a Train, The Da Vinci Treasure aped The Da Vinci Code, Transmorphers liberally lifted from Michael Bay’s Transformers, and Scott Derrickson’s The Day the Earth Stood Still do-over was joined by The Day the Earth Stopped, all while skirting so closely to the edges of copyright infringement there was nothing Tinseltown’s heaviest hitters could do about it. Well, almost.
Warner Bros failed with a cease and desist warning on the latter. Still, successful legal challenges did force The Asylum to rebrand American Battleship to American Warship so as not to risk the wrath of Peter Berg’s turgid board game adaptation Battleship. At the same time, Age of the Hobbits was rechristened Clash of the Empires to avoid the wrath of the J.R.R. Tolkien estate and Peter Jackson’s prequel trilogy.
It has dabbled in originality on occasion, though, which ironically gave rise to The Asylum’s biggest success by far. Sharknado spawned five sequels and three spinoffs and dramatically increased revenue and profits when the ludicrous concept became a viral word-of-mouth sensation, giving the group its first genuine crossover success story that wasn’t indebted to copying somebody else’s homework.
There’s something admirable about being so brazenly parasitic and profiting from it, with Rimawi telling Variety that “all of our films have made money” due to the cost-effective system in place that guarantees almost every single movie released with The Asylum branding will end up at least $100,000 in the black. Multiply that by the dozens of films it churns out every year, and it can’t be called anything other than one of the most consistently reliable hit factories in the entire industry.
Academy Award-winning producer Brian Grazer once compared The Asylum as akin to “pollution in Hollywood” because “you’ve just got to live with it”. That’s kind of the point, to be fair, with the production house never claiming to be anything other than the home of the mockbuster and a place known exclusively and specifically for making very bad and thrifty features that have a dedicated audience. Cult status was virtually guaranteed as a result, and it’s hard to begrudge the company’s success when it’s never made any bones about scraping the bottom of the barrel.
If Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was dumb enough to spawn a film backed by a major studio, then why shouldn’t The Asylum knock out Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies? If James Cameron’s Titanic became the highest-grossing movie in history, then who’s to say Titanic II shouldn’t have been made? The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Thor turned Chris Hemsworth into an overnight star, but there’s no reason why it can’t share a platform with The Almighty Thor.
The recurring theme among those aforementioned properties is that they’re either indebted to real events, real people, or characters who exist in the public domain, so strictly speaking, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with what The Asylum is doing. If anything, it’s being smarter than the majority of its competitors by not only jumping on a hot trend or bandwagon but doing it at the exact same time to maximise visibility and earning power.
It sounds oxymoronic and counterproductive given the way The Asylum continues to infuriate cinema’s staunchest purists, but maybe more companies should take a leaf out of its book. After all, the gap between small and large-scale cinema continues to widen by the day, but the upstart outfit with a penchant for imitation continues to not only survive but thrive.